MJS 007 My JS Story Mikeal Rogers

My JS Story Mikeal Rogers

On today's episode of My JS Story, Charles Max Wood welcomes Mikeal Rogers. Mikeal is the creator of NodeConf and request, community organizer at Node.js Foundation, and a co-host of RFC podcast. Tune in to My JS Story Mikeal Rogers to learn more about how he started in programming and what he is currently up to.

The Beginning of the Programming Journey

He was around 12 or 13 when he got a computer and assembled random parts on his own. Even before he really wanted to become a hacker. He never wrote a program from scratch. He just did some tweaks using different codes he got from people.

Eventually, he learned C which allows him to do inline assembly. Later on he started with Pearl where he really began from nothing in programming. He did port mapping, network manipulations, and the like.

Pearl Into JavaScript

He enjoyed doing Pearl, but some things changed when he started to become a real programmer. When he turned 18, he moved to Seattle and worked at HostPro which eventually emerged with Interland. They had a product which was like a container which felt like a private server.

Pearl was not hacking things which he had to maintain. Out of his frustration with Pearl, he resorted to Python which has nicer syntax. However, he soon got annoyed with how Python was managed and packaged. He stopped using Python and moved to Node.js basket.

Getting Into Node.js

Mikeal was one the core people who got involved with Node.js. There were a lot of people who played around the project, but there were only a handful who really delved into codes. Felix Geisendörfer was the first person to really work on it. Along with Tim Caswell, Paul Querna, Matt Ranney, Daniel Shaw, they'd get together in San Francisco and iterate harder parts of Node.

When Ryan Dahl first released Node, there were no API streams. Each component that was going to be a stream had separate API that was not compatible with each other. Those early streams work were done by Mikeal and his contemporaries.

To hear the rest of My JS Story Mikeal Rogers, download and listen to the entire episode.

Establish Connections

Learn more about Mikeal Rogers by connecting with him and see what he’s currently up to. You can follow him on Twitter @mikeal. Don’t forget to let Mikeal know you heard about him on Devchat.tv’s JavaScript Jabber My JS Story podcast!

If you’re short on time, here are the highlights of My JS Story Mikeal Rogers:

How did Mikeal get into programming? (00:29)

His story on Pearl into JavaScript? (3:00)

How does Node.js make a difference from Python in terms of threading? (9:29)